Medium-density hardboard is used extensively as siding on residential structures. One hardboard behavior that can be measured in the laboratory is thickness swell after exposure to water. This report reviews the literature on processing variables that are known to or likely to influence thickness swell. Where the literature on hardboard is sparse, research on other...

BENCHMARK 1988: A National Outdoor Recreation and Wilderness Forum was the first national recreation assessment meeting. The need for this meeting grew out of the desire to incorporate scientific, planning, and administrative peer review into the 1989 RPA Assessment of Outdoor Recreation and Wilderness. This meeting brought together many university and government...

The allocation of recreation use is a task that has challenged wilderness managers throughout the National Wilderness Preservation System for nearly two decades. This note reviews and evaluates approaches for allocating wilderness recreation use between commercially outfitted, institutionally outfitted, and nonoutfitted visitors to wildlands. Of the 17 identified...

This document outlines an iterative process for assessing the information needs for all Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) survey and manage species, designing and implementing strategic surveys (including field surveys and other information-gathering processes), and analyzing that information for use in the NWFP annual species review and adaptive-management processes. The...

One of the most critical, and difficult, steps in the Limits of Acceptable Change (LAC) process is the selection of indicators. To help with this step, this paper (I) briefly reviews some desirable characteristics of indicators and (2) lists indicators that have been proposed or adopted in LAC plans. From a comparison of this list of indicators and desirable...

This paper reviews available information on how intensive management of pine plantations affects wildlife in the southeastern United States. Practices discussed and evaluated in this paper include harvesting, site preparation, planting, thinning, burning, and fertilizing. Management of special habitat features (e.g., standing dead trees and down woody material) is...

The USDA Forest Service recently developed and adopted a code of ethical conduct for scientific research and development. The code addresses issues related to research misconduct, such as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research or in reporting research results, as well as issues related to professional misconduct, such...

Morels are prized edible mushrooms that fruit, sometimes prolifically, in many forest types throughout western North America. They are collected for personal consumption and commercially harvested as valuable special (nontimber) forest products. Large gaps remain, however, in our knowledge about their taxonomy, biology, ecology, cultivation, safety, and how to manage...

The commercial harvest of American matsutake (Tricholoma magnivelare) from forests in the Pacific Northwest has increased dramatically in the last decade. The similarity of this mushroom to the Japanese matsutake (T. matsutake) has prompted its harvest to meet increasing demands for matsutake in Japan. The American matsutake is...

The purpose of this paper is to extend a synthesis of knowledge about wilderness visitors and their visits developed in 1985. At that time, visitor research was in decline, and there was very little ability to understand trends. Over the last 15 years, wilderness visitor research has been initiated at many places in the U.S. where no previous studies had been completed...

Management of public lands occurs today with high levels of scrutiny and controversy. To succeed, managers seek the support, involvement, and endorsement of the public. This study examines trust as an indicator of managerial success and attempts to identify and measure the components that most influence it. A review of trust literature yielded 14 attributes that were...

The historic Wilderness Act celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2014, and wilderness social science shared a similar legacy. As paradoxical as it might seem, humans are an important part of wilderness, helping to define the very concept and representing an important component of wilderness use and management. Much of the past five decades of wilderness-related...

ECO-Report is an annual Rocky Mountain Research Station (RMRS) publication which contains a set of articles showcasing the Bitterroot Ecosystem Management Research Project (BEMRP) research projects and activities. The articles are concise, user-friendly, and designed to inform a broad range of audiences interested in ecosystem management. Articles featured in...